Birds kill trillions of worms and insects each year

Hence the saying the early bird gets the worm. But it's also the fashionably late bird, the tardy bird and even the truant bird. No worm is safe, and the soil will not aerate itself.

It is, however, always the second mouse that gets the cheese.

All of that said, cats killing birds is not intrinsically trivial. It is entirely possible that cat populations are larger than a local ecosystem could support, since we feed cats, and thus their population is not currently limited by starvation from lack of prey. If every cat were set free to fend for itself there would probably be a (short-term) bird and mouse-pocalypse. On the other hand, it seems likely that populations of some bird predators are smaller than the number the bird population could support. So with no cats we might find ourselves knee deep in birds. There is some number of billions of birds that are expected to be killed by some creature or another.

1. You should post this in GD.

4. Y'know Skp, I am considering doing just that. (It does have a point, though...)

The number of birds killed by cats keeps being posted in successive articles in GD, but birds kill waaaaaaay more bugs than cats could ever hope to kill birds, so I guess it's about where one's sympathies lie.